Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Eichmann creates an assembly line of sorts to assist in the orderly expulsion of the Jews from Vienna, and because of its success there, he is asked to set up a similar station in Prague, thus establishing him as “an ‘authority’ on emigration and evacuation” and “as the ‘master’ who knew how to make people move” (65). Having shown his “mettle” in Vienna, Eichmann is granted four promotions between 1937 and 1941, achieving the rank of “Obersturmbannführer, or lieutenant colonel,” a post in which “Eichmann underwent a genuine and lasting personality change” (64-5). While he would never hold an office as high as Müller, or Heydrich, or Himmler, Eichmann “neither was […] as small as the defense wished him to be” (58). Servatius “chose to ignore” some of the facts Eichmann proposes, namely his perceived relationship with the Zionists in Vienna, in hopes of establishing for his client a line of defense in which Eichmann did nothing but follow orders. Eichmann’s “authority” on forced emigration would soon be tested in a different venture, as “the Reich had acquired, through the conquest of Polish territories, two or two and a half million more Jews,” rendering expulsion as the answer to “the Jewish question” virtually impossible (67).